


mask like castlereagh

by billspilledquill



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel, French Revolution RPF
Genre: 18th Century Flower Language (just to say screw you to your enemy), Canon Era, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Hints At Robespierre/Desmoulins, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 12:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15194831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Camille thought that death can’t be worse than looking at Saint-Just’s face every day. Turns out that it’s exactly what death is.





	mask like castlereagh

**Author's Note:**

> This is the fic that took me more time than all the other works I did for the fandom, probably. A lot of revisions and rewrites, and this fic still doesn’t make much sense to me. Like, what it is this thing about anyway? I took a lot of historical liberties, but overall I hope I am still faithful to the era. 
> 
> Special thanks to AStupidUserName420, Wuduan and lindasusany for putting up with me and leaving sweet comments! 
> 
> Sorry for the long upshot. Wish I could upload it at July 14 but I am currently in hospital so it won’t be possible. Happy early Bastille Day!

 

 

 _I met Murder on the way -_  
_He had a mask like Castlereagh_  
_― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester_

 

 

Lucile, he thinks. What will Lucile thinks of me?

Maximilien doesn’t exactly understand how to repair things that are permanently closed. He does, however, destroy them when the smallest slip open, rip it from the ground from which it is planted, ripping it to sheds.

Desmoulins went to his room yesterday, here’s what happened:

Camille cried at his feet, asking for forgiveness. He said what he had done was a calamity that was as useless as it was stupid. He asked to be friends with him again, as if they weren’t anymore. _Like at Le Grand, Maxime, do you remember?_

Robespierre gasps a little, feeling his forehead damp with sweat. He turns and grasps at his bedsheet, his head pounding.

 _Robespierre!_ — Maxime— you are no greater than Demouriez and Hébert— - Last night. Yesterday. Here’s what actually happened:

Camille was angry at him for a number of reasons, and accountable or not, mad or frustrated. Sad, for other reasons. And he remembers feeling the same when Camille has walked over and took the bread and throw it on the ground. The fear. How he said there isn’t sugar anymore. It feels as if he just confessed something intractable and acutely important.

(Everything Camille says seem like an condemnation, full of sound and fury, and he, like a priest, hears them with head held high, and confess what sins he had left in this small, small world.)

How small, he thinks, how small Camille looked when he had straightened himself taller, something of a cape had covered his feet, his reason.

_His sanity._

Some sort of fate, Maxime. You wanted to cheat fate by the pure force of faith. How feverish you look. Burning is never an answer— Do you remember what you said to me at the Convention last night? _How exuberant you were being, how you enjoyed bringing me down, Maxime— I don’t understand why—_

_Why— what has changed?_

_Nothing, nothing, nothing. And this scares me more than anything._

You were acting childish, he said. Humiliation is the same as humility. And Camille walked around and around, like some damned, broken thing, until he walked away, his steps light and sharp.

“We are fighting for freedom,” he says, after that Camille had left. He remembers, he truly, terrifyingly does. “But oh god, the cost of it.”

It feels like it didn’t happened, or else Robespierre wouldn’t be sick in bed right now.

He murmurs feverishly, wishing there are stars instead of the sun. It is way too hot here.

He brings back Camille in this waste land. He always brings him back when he has nothing to lose.

“Maximilien,” Élénore says to him through the soft hazy mist of his own mind, her hair in her usual bonnet, white with flowers at the edges, “let’s greet each other.”

“I’m sick.” He says, and so he embraces her in a place where there’s no madness, not too mad, and something about sugar raises to his mind, but it closes off after the thought of the drums comes back to him.

“I’m sick,” he says again, forgetting it. “I’m sick and I hate it.”

She pauses in her working. “Sometimes I wonder if I am able to see through you,” she says. “But then I realize that you are just a stack of thin bones, waiting to collapse.”

She still doesn’t let go of him, though. “And mind you, that I am not a archbishop nor archeologist. I don’t play with dead things, Maximilien.” He shudders at that. Feeling the words sinking. “I don’t play with dead things.“

He has a wet, choked laugh. “You would play me like a flute, and it would still have the most harmonious sound, coming from you.”

She acquiesces and ignores his useless plea, as always. “Do you need some water?”

“I’m tired,” he says. “It always starts like this, why am I always sick?”

Her warm eyes smiled at him, and Camille’s eyes shone that way, he thinks. Louis-Le Grand. He doesn’t look the same, or the person in front of him is not him. And he splutters out, almost scared.

“Remember monsieur Grouillet? He had always a face of a crapaud. He chased us one time for- for,” he stops, looking up at the confused sight. It’s still Élénore, and he forgets what he had to say.

There can be Député Pétion or Mirabeau in front him, it does not matter. He is just a sick man.

“Please do fetch me some water,” he says at last. “You needn’t to stay, I’ll be sleeping, my friend.”

When she is gone, the soft creaking of the door resound for a few moments more, he taps on his bedside. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three. Élénore knows, and when she knows something, there’s no way any other will know.

“What did he chased us for?” He asks. “I couldn’t quite remember it. Was it some predicament for your writing, again?”

“Ah,” he says. “Yes, I remember,” he starts again, opening his mouth. It feels like roaring. “I remember what you said to me when you first show me your writing, I said,” he swallows, closing his eyes, remembering. “I said that monsieur Grouillet would chase you again for it, were he not dead.”

And Camille laughed, and the secret was kept. Camille later pointed to a wrong word about Jacques Roux, and corrected it, the quill scratching the paper like a cat’s claws.

And he laughs to himself, almost choked on it, “I really do hope there is no need for chasing this time, I really do.”

When the sun slowly creeps back, orange and blue, he hears the soft cries of citizens and the people’s torches flaring red, lightening the sky like fresh blood. The gods are athirst, and the people spit on them.

 

*

 

_“I don’t like Rabbit,” Camille says. His uniform is a little detached. He helps him to adjust it._

_“You will have to endure,” Maximilien replies. “Everything stays the same even if you are broody like that.”_

_Camille looks up at him. He was smaller and thinner, and he rose on his heels to look at Robespierre, eyes round like a frightened cat._

_“Then what,” he asks, “can I do to make everything change, Maxime?”_

 

*

 

L’Hôtel des États-Unis. The street was quiet during the day, but something about the nightfall breaks down the semblance of peace in the Paris wrought. Saint-Just’s face light up where he saw who enters. Light up as one would do when you find a hat in your pocket instead of money. The most ordinary things sometimes can light people’s torches, and ever easier if there’s gunpowder in your possession. And there, there, there he is.

That day reads like some kind of anachronistic roman à clef, reads like an old man’s quirk of quill, reads like doomsday’s near. Saint-Just’s eyes flare at the thought, looking for some kind of clues in the man’s cufflinks.

(A little too clean for a dead man, he thinks. His mind flashes to Lebas. His son.)

“Maître Desmoulins,” he demands. “This is not one of your miscalculated sense of direction that brings you here, is it?”

The man only nodded, paid his respect for the secretary that brought him here. Saint-Just asked him to sit down. Desmoulins only walked to the window, his back facing him. Saint-Just stares, looking at the deep green coat, the edges of his frail shoulders.

He stands up, looking at the other’s hands. Some letters, he muses. Saint-Just tries to picture him holding a spear. He has trouble not to laugh at that, so he thinks about Apollo making love to a man instead.

“We used to have correspondences,” Desmoulins says softly, eyes on the rigid slides of the commoners outside his residence, he waves to exactly no one. “I’m here to return them.”

“I don’t recall,” he says.

This time, Desmoulins turns around, his black curls framing his face in a way that is almost impossibly volatile, waiting for destruction. He smiles. “Sure you don’t,” he says. “Praising me isn’t perhaps a good enough issue to remember.”

Saint-Just examines Desmoulins with consideration. Has he cut his hair like the Parisian mob? “I don’t like to keep unimportant things with me, it is tiring.”

He backs a step, just to see better. The blade would cut just above the hair, he thinks. If only Desmoulins had considered about it before he had cut it. It would be less of a trouble then.

“Your head is filled with damning legislatures and corrupt thoughts,” Camille says.

“And you are mad and cold, etc. Let’s skip these petty judgments for now,” Saint-Just shrugs and gestures the seat. Desmoulins complies.

“I consider myself more of a charlatan than a fanatic,” he hums.

“Don’t play god with me, Desmoulins.”

“I’m at age to become the sans-culottes Jesus,” he says, folding the letters. He pulls his glasses and puts them on the bridge of his nose. Sometimes Saint-Just forgets that he is, after all, very much older than himself. “That’s a dangerous state to be in.”

Saint-Just sits down as well, a hand cupping his cheek. His hair shadowing his left shoulder. He forgets again about the age. “You are a child.”

Desmoulins didn’t look up from his letter analysis, and unfold them one by one. “And you, citizen, are a _bourreau_.”

“One can only condemn rationally,” he says. Camille arches an eyebrow, looking ready to rip the letter apart. Looking ready to gesture at the broken pieces after.

He turns the paper, a little crumbled, a little old. It looks like it belonged in another time, when Alexander was still raging in the battlefield.

 

_Adieu mon cher Desmoulins,_

_Si vous avez besoin de moi, écrivez-moi. Vos derniers numéros sont pleins d’excellentes choses. Apollon et Minerva ne vous ont point encore abandonné en vous en déplaise. Si vous avez quelque chose à faire dire à vos gens de Guide, je les reverrai dans huit jours à Laon où j’irai faire un tour pour affaires particulières._

_Adieu, encore, gloire, paix et rage patriotique,  
Saint-Just._

_PS: Je vous lirai ce soir car je ne vous parle de vos derniers numéros que par ouï dire._

 

“What is the meaning of this?” Saint-Just asks, throwing the paper into the fire place. “You came here to return these insensitive and— laughable things I have wrote to you? Even I would have thought better of you, Desmoulins.”

Camille’s eyes were turned to the glowing, bright letter in ashes. The ambers flicker. He laughs, a tinge of hysteria in it. “I never doubted you, though. You are still, still—“ he says, his stutter only more apparent in the silence. Something of a laugh bubbles up in his throat. “So—“ he chuckles in a way that makes Saint-Just mad at himself to even let him in. “ _So_ — sincere.”

Sincere is a good word. Sincere doesn’t imply thirst for blood, profit or self-acclamation. Sincere is a not a word Camille Desmoulins on use on him. Sincere is not a good word.

“I have nothing to hide.”

“Yes, well,” he nods, both of his palms on the desk. His eyes met his, and Saint-Just mistakes the bright fire that burns his. It burns, and Saint-Just wants to grab his coat. It burns, cold. “I’m not here to beg for your sincerity nor forgiveness, Louis-Antoine.”

Saint-Just’s ears turn up at his first name. “You come here— like some damsel in distress, dressing in red, taking up letters like a lost lover— you sure are going for a compromise that either requires begging or bribe.”

“Embezzlement of funds, like Danton.” He adds, quite belatedly. There are so much in his mind, these days.“The company of East Indies—“

“He did what was worth his time and was not involved,” Desmoulins snaps, his eyes blazing. “And I’m not here to bicker with Robespierre’s hound about _Danton’s_ servitude to the Republic.”

“And what are you,” he asks, nonchalant. He had heard it too many times. “His mistress?”

“I’m better,” Desmoulins says, looking at his belongings, the neatness of them, his eyes almost questioning. “At least I have a better bed.”

“Go on with what you have to say,” he says, throwing the rest of the letters in the fire. Desmoulins didn’t bother lifting an eye. “ _Spill_.”

Camille’s eyes are fixed at something behind him. The rings in his brown pupils were blown. He taps on the table, once. “I’m here to see,” he answers. “A fellow’s farewell. Surely you won’t deny me this, Archange de la Révolution?”

“See what,” he says, word by word, biting. “Your journal is not valid anymore.”

He shrugs, “The people still listens. But I’m not here to represent the people.”

“You made your whole life on that,” he responds. Camille’s hands ball into fists. “Your life as we’ll remember it, that is.”

“As we should,” he agrees. “History will mention you in a footnote, or better,” Camille has a self-satisfied smile on his face, “on an critical paper.”

“A couple of sentences, I’d like to hope.”

“A couple of metaphors,” Camille snatch up a quill, writes on a piece of fresh paper. The ink’s still new, Antoine frowns. “Imagine their surprise to find that butterflies didn’t even bat a wing when the Bastille fell, that the Gods weren’t cheering in the high skies, that Rousseau is not turning in his grave when— just imagine,” he says, his head buried to the fine scratches of the quill. “I can picture their amazement when they’ll hear all our justifications for the deaths of thousands.”

“Imagine,” he says, ending whatever he is writing with a spiral. His arms gesturing wildly. “Imagine that it doesn’t have to be me at the Palais-Royal. That it won’t change anything more than a name.”

“Don’t use my desk.”

“I’m only using your ink supplies.”

Saint-Just pushes himself up, straightening. “Have you always been this way,” he bites the inside of his cheek, the metallic favor forces its way between his teeth. “To talk about a future that you don’t know shit about?”

“I try my best,” Camille says, writing, writing his way out. The only thing that keeps him alive, perhaps. His stammers seem like a priest’s gaps at a newborn. “The eighteenth century is grim, Saint-Just. But the next would be better. People will unite, and all of France will unite. The nineteen century would bloom in people’s favor. Do you think we have enlightened the world?” He asks. Saint-Just doesn’t think he was addressing to him.

“I have learnt my Declaration of Rights of both years, my constitution of ninety-one. I know the Social Contract, know its principles. I known the great men, I have my Caesar, my Brutus, the knives and the conspiracies. I have my alliterations for poetry, I have correct yours, I have written mine. What is greater than to watch the recesses of history bringing the destruction of the Ancien Régime? What is greater than to watch the great men building anew from its ashes? What is greater than to be one of them?”

Camille is now writing as if his life depended on it. Maybe it is. “What is greater than to die for it?”

He whispers some other things to himself, and Saint-Just almost felt bad for giving him the truth so easily. It pains him how blatant the answer is, and how stupid Camille has to be not noticing it.

“To be free,” Saint-Just simply says, for it was the one truth he couldn’t deny to anyone, not even him.

“France is not free yet, therefore not great,” he lashes out. And Antoine doesn’t, really doesn’t believe him. “The Republic is not France in its entirety. The Republic is destroying, not creating its own people.”

“France does not need new creations, she does not need freedom to be ascend from the above.” Saint-Just says then. He crosses his arms, looking, somewhat symbolically, at the map of his motherland. He reaches out shakily, his fingers running through the mountains and touching the different skies that surround them, dribbling rain or sunlight, the country who’s like a goddess, a god.

“France is great because she is France. The Republic is only the fuel of the torch of liberty; but France will outlast her just like Rome outlasts theirs.”

And Desmoulins finally looked up, his eyes red, his lashes fluttering shut for second. He puts down the quill, his fingers stained.

He nods, a small, grimaced smile on his face. “Do you take for me for an ignorant man? I know for one that the liberty of the citizen ends where the liberty of another begins,” he admits. And then he laughs. He pushes him with surprising gentleness, pins Saint-Just on the wall where France lays behind. His steps echo within the room.

“You,” he whispers just enough for him to hear, and he suspects that’s just because he wants people to lean closer. “You to indoctrinate republicans! You, to warm up, in the name of principles, hearts that have grown cold!”

“You’re spending your wrath uselessly. Economize your ammunition.” He shrugs him off, and Camille looks as if he did very much like to shot him in the head.

Desmoulins crosses his arms, his body inclining to a side. “It is not yet a new world, so be careful of your orthodox thinking.”

“There’s nothing good or bad,” Antoine retorts. “It is only us.”

Desmoulins uncaps the powder, puts it on the written word, blowing off the excesses. He waits the paper to dry.

“Don’t you think it is a little selfish to blame it all on mankind?” Silence. “But sure,” he says. “It depends on one’s judge.”

He shakes off the powder on the ground carelessly. It would be silly if he hesitated at that moment. He folds it in fours. “Here,” he says. “I came here to give you a piece of my mind about yourself.”

“I believe I already know them from your previous articles.”

“No,” he shakes his head, his black curls falling backwards. “I always have something new for you, you know that.”

“Oh,” he says, taking Camille’s reaching hand, the paper. Their fingers brush. Something of a fleeting, thoughtless, horrible thing. “I know.”

They exchange glance, once. Desmoulins nods, twice since he did entered. Within three seconds, he was gone, and the room falls silent, as one does when a fly goes out of the window: just as it was supposed to be.

He paces back to the table, eyeing the letter. He almost drops it.

 

_Vous êtes, de tout mon respect, monsieur, de la merde._

_Cordialement,  
C. Desmoulins._

 

He folds them; tenfold. He tries to suppress a laugh, because this is so absurdly hilarious, so blatantly pointless as it is idiotic. Indulgence of vice.

(And Camille, half of Paris will be happy to acknowledge, has an abrasive tone to his voice, and does not at all indulge in his vices. The other half will just as eagerly speak the contrary, and soon the popular opinion is lost in the masses.)

He couldn’t help but look back at France on fours on his wall. His eyes trail on the frontline of the Vendée and Lyon; the glory of the Republic, the gore that glorified it with the people’s blood.

He puts the letter in a drawer, knowing that he won’t ever look at it again.

 

*

 

“You’re pale,” Danton points out. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“A devil,” he replies a little tiredly. Danton’s creases under his eyes deepened. Has he been working all day? “I had a little tour with the spirit of the revolution.”

Danton chuckles, his hand on his friend’s shoulder. Camille feels like running, just for a little.

“You’re being stubborn; a child, Camille. What do you think you could have changed by meeting with that scélérat? Were you looking or mercy or condemnation?” he exclaims, laughing over his drink.

He licks his lips, wondering if it was still the sugary drink he is prone to, or it is something different, something bitter.

“Neither, I suppose.” He does not mention the letters. “I just wanted to humiliate him by stepping foot in his house.”

Danton shakes his head promptly, everything about Georges is so damn extravagant, a man that requires grandeur, Camille thinks. “You’re _impossible_.” Danton says.

(And this, Camille remembers his weight on Georges’, his hand on his waist, the smell of Parisian streets: this is _possible_ and _not enough_.)

Desmoulins shrugs. “Have you spoken with Fabre yet?”

“About what?”

“Imminent death, insurrections, speeches at the Convention,” he complies. Danton has always been good with people, but not intrusive enough to understand. “Things that weigh at this time of year again, I suppose.”

“My dear boy,” Danton says, tapping on his shoulder in a way that make his bones vibrate through his clothes. _And his clothes were fine._ “There would have been no such revolution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the revolution was to scatter them all to the winds.” He pauses, not to think, Camille knows, but to sip his wine like a bourgeois minister during a great conference. Danton hates thinking during bold proclamations like these.

So he lets the words sink at the same rhythm of his heart, and it does him good, for awhile.

“Death is not free,” Danton says, just to finish it even more blandly. “So the Republic frees us of it!”

Camille half-heartedly waits for the applause that is to come after. The tavern closes soon, and almost every sane citizen is gone, except a few knitting women and some spy, waiting for their pay. He wonders which one they belong to, but decides against it.

“You’re too pessimistic,” Camille answers, leaning a little to him.

“I’m on verge of falling in an Utopia, my friend.” Danton says, rubbing his face. “And what happens when we fall is our problem.”

“Do you plan to do something?” He asks.

“I plan to be more virtuous to my wife every night,” he huffs, and gets up. Camille grabs his arm.

“ _Georges_.”

“What, do you want to come?” Danton didn’t even bothered to shake his hand off. “Because I possess more than one kind of virtue, I believe.”

Camille tightens his grip. “Do you plan to do something?”

He tilts his head, his horrid eyes innocent. “What do you mean?”

He looks at him. “You’re leading us to death while you’re busy fucking your fifteen year-old wife.”

Danton winces a little, and Camille didn’t even grip him _that_ hard. “Two things that don’t confront the other’s interest.”

“You can’t bring everyone down, Georges.”

Danton sniffs, and finally bothered to distance himself, his chest heavy. Is his heart buzzing with contempt? “I’m not,” he says. “No one can bring the great Danton down.”

Camille doesn’t move, but somehow he feels like he is touching him, his face, his scar, pulling his hair as hard as he can. “You know I won’t leave you, Georges,” he admits, in quiet defeat. He tilts his head. “I’d hope you’ll at least bother to have a pretense in caring.”

He reaches out, and Danton slaps his hand away. Camille looks at him as if to say: see? Georges sighs, brushes his knuckles with Camille’s. “You are just like our little young Conventionnel, sometimes.”

He licks his lips, try not to think too much of it. “I don’t see why.”

Danton sees him and almost laughs. “He and you are those kind of pretty things that don’t care to whore yourselves in order to get what you want,” he says. “Too much of that righteousness and fury that seem to be the fashion of the day.”

“I know who I am.”

Danton stares. “You only know who you’re not.”

“Does it matter,” he retorts tiredly, Danton seems to triumph on it, “now that we’re all going to die?”

Danton hiccups, because of wine or what, and his breath catches. He looks amused. “You’re afraid?”

“No,” he says. “Just way more exhausted of your rhetoric than usual.”

“You’re not looking at me,” he says.

“No one needs to see your face, especially after seven years.”

“Your lips are trembling.” He points out.

Camille trembles a little more, half for the show, half for the cold, and none for the need to feel like he exists. “Maybe that’s just because you should take the hint.”

And so Danton lets out an unexpected huff and kisses him, coincidentally, the same way just before they were headed to the guillotine.

_You can’t stop our lips from touching in the basket, you can’t stop the mingling of our breaths that hath already stopped, a tread that will last as long as their hair can still entangle, black on black on black on black._

And this, and whatever this exactly _is_ , he thinks again when the wine slips through his teeth and tongue, _this_ is what death should feel like.

This, _is_ death.

And he clings to him as if his life depends on it.

 

*

 

_“Maxime,” he starts again. They have had this conversation before. He is taller than him, but Robespierre still adjusts his cravat when he doesn’t notice it. “I don’t like you, sometimes.”_

_The s trails like a burden on his tongue, it so difficult to get them out. He smiles and bites it down with his teeth._

_“You will have to endure,” Maximilien says, trapped in his own thoughts._

_“Now everything changes,” he answers. “I don’t see why I will have to endure now.”_

_“Not everything,” Maximilien’s hand tightens on his white linen. “You didn’t change a bit.”_

_He’s talking about the stutters, he’s talking about his dislike of Rabbit, he’s talking about his inability to arrange his own clothing. He’s talking about it as if he was the everything Camille is referring to._

_“But now everything changes,” Camille muses. “Everything does.”_

 

*

 

Saint-Just’s secretary had brought him a bouquet of wild flower; wild tansy at the center, surrounded with Dodders, these wild herbs like parasites. There’s Basil and red garden anemone, Saint-John’s wort, Fragrant Coltsfoot and Camille just wonders how much time he had given himself just to be able tell him in a not very subtle way to call him off. It’s ridiculous, it’s stupid, and just a little over the edge, just like the man himself.

He will need a guillotine to silence him, and maybe even a guillotine will not succeed.

Camille doesn’t mind it too much, though, and he gladly accept them as the custom for a republican funeral, with him being one the first to witness republican baptism. He is already hearing about la patrie and the call to arms for the death of tyranny, just as he did a century, a millennium ago.

(Maybe even more far so, but he couldn’t bring himself to care when the smell of the flowers is flooding his entire sensory organs, like lead.)

 

*

 

“You’ll have to write the report.”

“I always write them,” he says, his voice just a little higher. “I always read the damn report.”

Robespierre stills at the curse, but doesn’t comment on it. Thank god or whoever he needs to thank nowadays. “You’ll need to write it as soon as possible, Saint-Just. We don’t have much time before Danton and his friends put up another lie that will cover up the one before.”

The other members of the Committee are silent during their conversation. One or two of them are on mission, and the others just assumed that their objective at the moment is to keep everything under control, which is, in any way, a little bit too much of a bargain for any of them.

And, must like most other things, Billaud-Varenne is the first to step in the picture, repaint it with his own colors, and proceed to judge it as it were christ’s flesh, and the small of Saint-Just’s back shivers despite himself.

“When’s the report to be done?” Billaud-Varenne asks. “I don’t want it to be like one of citizen Genet’s speeches, long and winding, unnecessarily passionate.”

“Danton,” Collot steps in, and quietly, “D’Églantine and Desmoulins. The triumvirates that are plotting for our destruction,” he tilts his head toward Saint-Just. “I guess this will be a fine start for your redaction.”

“How about this,” he answers, a small smile loops upwards. “ _Cloots liked the universe, except France._ ”

This doesn’t bring much of a laugh in the room, and more likely froze features on each of their faces. Maximilien doesn't bother to lighten the mood, and rubs his temples. He says with some contempt, “This report will be needed for the next three days. I except you to sharpen your quill, and not to joke about our common enemy. We cannot let them win, Louis-Antoine. Not when the Republic is at stake.”

He was not joking, but then again, he would expect this kind of reception if he really made one.

Antoine doesn’t much fiddle with his pen, but he’s close to break it. Carnot waves his hand, watches Robespierre frowning at the gesture.

“Let the kid do what it ought to do,” Carnot says. “Citizen Saint-Just has always been a great Demosthenes, but orators need to think before speaking, or else their language comes out unvalued.”

Saint-Just crosses his arms, and let the comment on his age go unnoticed. He backs a few steps, ready to leave.

Someone touches his arm. The man doesn’t quite meet his gaze.

“Citizen Lindet,” he says, stopping.

“Citizen,” Lindet replies, his eyes still trailing on the floor.

His hand is on his shoulder, and Saint-Just blurts out, “You told me that you are here to protect citizens, and not to murder patriots.”

“I have said that, yes,” Lindet looks up, clear pride on his face.

“You didn’t sign the decree for their arrests,” he points out. “What do you want, as you say, by talking to a murderer of patriotism?”

Lindet’s grasp on his shoulder soften, an offering of peace. He nods slowly. “I still stand by that, you know,” he says, “so is your report.”

He arches an eyebrow, but doesn’t speak. Lindet explains, “This Convention needs to survive, and if the cost is taking down _l’homme du dix août_ , so be it.”

“You sound as if we have run out of choice.”

“Are we not?”

Saint-Just extents his hand to him. “I just never considered dying a choice.”

Lindet pauses for a moment, and smiles. They shake hands. Learning about diplomacy suddenly looks a plausible, simpler goal. “I think I have come to expect you to live on forever.”

“I’m young and will likely die,” he answers, already thinking of the beginning paragraph of the accusation. Indulgence of vice. “Best time for immortality.”

 

*

 

Danton and his peers, though, will be on sixteen germinal, he understands. He is just glad to exclude Camille out of debates for so long.

There is how it ends the first apostle of liberty! Camille says.

Somewhere a woman sitting on a stool yawns, saying that they have heard it too many times, citizen, please, if we’ll have to wait with that sun high on our face, at least entertain us a little with your death! Copying Madame Roland is only going to get you laughs!

So when he yelled _Lucile_ , the world was silent for a moment, and finally, finally, that woman clapped, satisfied and entertained, now that’s nice for a change once in a while, I’d like to hope that Lucile was his mistress or some prostitute in the streets! That’s all we write these days.

That’s all they write these days.

 

*

 

Saint-Just has been trying to write about love since he was born. The way he clutched his father’s coat when he was seeing stars and calling Christ is just one of them. He supposes that’s how love ends: without it.

And it’s over, and he thinks, his hand moving a little, forming sentences in his mind. Another report in his head. This is how the Republic kisses their children; slow and steady. And when he lifts his hands to the squinting sun, he sees no blood on them.

 

*

 

He is glad for the window to hide the drums that precede the execution. He doesn’t mind his ears humming at the sound, not exactly. But sometimes it’s just better to leave things as they ought to be.

So from time to time he grips the letter in his hand tighter, trying to do exactly that.

“Give me back that letter,” Robespierre says, his hands clutching the edge of his desk. Saint-Just tries to not take it as a condescending tone and fails.

“I don’t see why I can’t keep it,” he answers softly, hoping that the people is already cheering long enough for them not hearing the slicing of heads. At least the window is closed, and the residence is far enough from it. Just enough.

“Ca— _he_ wrote it to me,” Robespierre says. “Let me see it.”

“I’d rather not,” he says, and steps farther away from him.

“God damnit!” Robespierre cries, losing his composure, yet it is not enough. “ _Antoine_.”

Maxime’s room is suffocating at times, especially if he is in it. He sees Robespierre, shoulders tense and rigid, his breaths coming out like stutters, and Saint-Just realizes, quite belatedly, that his best friend is dead, and there’s so way he can amend this more than others can.

Robespierre lets out a humorless laugh, that makes him almost drops the letter and run away, but he composes himself at the last minute and Maxime says, softly, accusatory, “You are just like her, aren’t you?”

Saint-Just doesn’t know, but he doesn’t ask, anyway. “And you are just like _him_ , sometimes.” He waves a little the letter, and every sense of composure the man has left disappears.

Like right now, he thinks. The fury between the creases of your eyes is exactly him, when I told him to be free, that nothing compares to be free. _To be free._

“Herodotus said that haste brings failure, you know,” he breathes and tries not to feel small under the weight of a single sheet.

This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power.

Robespierre looks like he would much very like flip the table and let the papers run free. “You don’t need to protect me from anything. I will not appreciate it.”

“I know,” he says.

“You are doing exactly that,” he retorts.

“If you really want to see it,” Antoine suggests lightly. “You would have. But you aren’t. You aren’t strangling me with your bare hands, you aren’t ordering me to my death, and you can do both of those things at the same time, yet you aren’t. Why is that?”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You don’t want to see the content of this letter,” he says. “You don’t want to hurt yourself.”

Saint-Just doesn’t need to see him, for the moment. He turns his heels, the floor creaking at every footsteps. “I hated him and all that he stood for,” he says, the doorknob just in front him. “just as I have admired him for what he used to be. You are trailing after a dream, and you know it.”

“I don’t hate him,” He hears Robespierre saying a little too quickly. Saint-Just eyes at the fire place just beside him.

He turns his head. “You don’t love him.”

“He’s my friend,” he says, tiredly. “Of course I do.”

“You want to fuck him?”

Robespierre’s lips twitch at the word. “—No.”

He nods, “He has a better bed, I suppose.” He places the letter in the fire before Robespierre can stop it. “There, you found it, your answer. You don’t need a convicted letter to confirm it.”

“What do you mean?” He asks, resigned, voice weak enough to make Saint-Just believe that he doesn’t want to hear his answer.

“That you don’t hate him,” and he says it anyway. “That he is your friend.”

Beside, the reminder of any letter rises, flickers in the fire, dies, form ashes on the fireplace.

Robespierre looks at him, wide eyed. “That you love him,” he adds without thinking, and Maximilien ends up where he is supposed to be. The words start here. The tears fall here, and this is how revolution falls, in and out of each other.

 _I am only bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it_ , he almost says, but thinks better of it. The window clatters against the wind.

(They are not raptured by history. It’s just that, no metaphors of a better future, no speeches for the greater good. It’s just a time for a friend to grieve.

But it’s not the end, and grieving takes too much time to be truly worth it.)

Maximilien laughs, a little choked. “You are just like her.”

He walks away and leaves him to his privacy. He hopes that girl will not let him break a chair or something, but he doesn’t know who she is. He’s glad he doesn’t.

The bells didn’t ring in the sky, there’s no wrath of god. Heads didn’t fall from the sky, only on the ground, in the common grave. La mort, la mort, la mort. Equality for all. Vive La République.

 

*

 

Where to start. Where to finish. The end starts; at night, Saint-Just wakes up with sugar on his face.

Not that he minds too much, though. (At a better time his sisters used to rub dirt on his face because you look just like a lovely mutt, Louis! Believe me, that’s your true nature!

And he used to let them, and listened to their soft giggles and thought in their small town and their small world, maybe that’s who I am after all.)

But there aren’t sugar at home anymore. He doesn’t have sugar for the past months, let along wasting them on some strange case of beauty mask in the middle of the night.

“Albert?” He mumbles quietly, his head buried in his pillow. His head pounding from being woke up in dead midnight. He hasn’t been sleeping since the damn report. There are speeches to be done. “Is it you?”

The wind blows softly. He was sure he had left the window closed for the night.

He groans, and let his bare feet touch the ground. The coldness slips through him, soaks through the bones. His eyes open in alert, but the sleepiness remains.

He stares, dazed at the plate of sugar floating in the air.

He calls for his secretary again, just to make sure. He must be sleeping in the other room. Saint-Just sighs a little, blinking away the grains of sugar trapped in his lashes.

This is a joke from someone he knows, only them will bother to be on their feet at night to assassinate him at this hour of the day. Only them would have such bad taste in humor, beside himself.

“I thought there is no time for kindred spirits before heading to battles,” he says. The plate shakes, as if in laughter. Saint-Just frowns and shudders despite himself.

He stands, the floor creaking a little. He almost congratulates himself for being able to do so. Food hasn’t been his priority for the past few weeks. Neither is standing with two feet on solid ground. He thinks he’s been used to sitting.

Saint-Just stares at the plate of sugar, his hand reaching, stretching a little farther, hoping to touch something, something solid, dimensional. Something _real_.

“I’d hope it’s not Barère who’s been wanting to steal my bed for so long,” he whispers, just to see the reaction. The plate shakes even more, and he almost feels bad for the falling sugar. White gold.

The world turns, just a little. He tries to grip rock bottom, a concrete thing on his grip.

His fingers tremble, stop. Oh, there’s something. He feels _something_ between his fingers. It’s real. “There’s—“

Clatters of tables and documents. Books fell from the shelves, the earth shatters a little, then a lot, and there’s a hysteria somewhere, somewhere— _there’s something real_ — he holds it tight. And the wind blows from the inside, this time.

He doesn’t know when he hits the ground. His throat feels dry. He chokes when grains of sugar that entered his lungs and scrap his insides like sand. Saint-Just struggles, counting his breath, somehow trust that it won’t stop for now.

His eyes close painfully, trying despite himself not to vomit whatever he haven’t eat this morning. He curls his fingers, holding, tasting with his skin the object in his hands. His temples hitch at every sound.

 _Basil_.

“Stop, Desmoulins.” He says. “You are destroying my house.”

The wind rages, until it stops abruptly. He scoffs, mocking himself a little, here’s death’s silence. Only the slow snuffling of curtains. An unasked question hanging in the air. He shows the dried basil between his fingers, already withered with holes.

He hears two hits on the floor, and tries not to imagine a spirit stomping at his foot in frustration. No one laughs in front of a poltergeist.

“I’m just glad you liked my flowers.” He says, and the basil is immediately snatched away, the movement sending a cold, freezing shiver down his spine.

The basil falls on the plate, and they are altogether put out of the window. A clash is heard, and no more.

“I guess I shouldn’t have said it,” he tells him, a smile threatening to break on his face.

They proceed to circle around each other. Or least, he thinks so. He picks up his books and places them one by one in the shelves. The winds won’t fade, they pierce through his thin gowns, right through the skin like blades.

He hopes that’s not how it would feel once on the battlefields. He had not been there for so long, he almost thinks he had forgotten it, the feeling of knives scrapping your veins.

“You will never stop being agonizingly predictable, even after death,” he says to his books. The Histories of English Parliamentary Systems. “I believe that’s an achievement in its own right.”

A book hits him right on the face.

He loses balance and the books accumulate on him like a piles of clouds. But they are heavy, and Saint-Just’s head is too. Perhaps he needs to call Albert to clean up this mess.

The floor is cold, but it’s better than the feeling of touching the abyss. He warps arms around himself, his head resting on one shoulder, and his mind drifts to a different direction than he had anticipated. He winces at the spiking pain his left shoulder is sending to the rest of his body, and curls into himself further.

“Why aren’t you doing that to Danton?” He asks. And the atmosphere freezes. There’s probably froze on his bedsheet. He buries his head in his two arms, a small chuckle escapes his lips. “Oh, right. He’s dead too.”

And with a frightened moment he thinks that he has gone completely crazy, he thinks that he is talking to a making of his own mind, that coffee and tea and work had brewed him into a relapse of turmoils just like with his father, that he is true and I am not, that I am dead and he isn’t, that this is a dream, and nothing is achieved. He grits his teeth and bites his lips until it bleeds. The metallic flavor spreads to the gums and teeth and calms him down.

He breathes. “You are not supposed to be here. You aren’t supposed to be anywhere.”

He can’t see with his head in his arms, so all he understands was a clattering of utensils. You’ll wake up the neighbors. He lets him instead, and says, “If you are here just to annoy me, just tell me.”

There’s a silent inquiry in the air. He can’t believe he’s trying to make conversations with something that, if stayed, would probably set his house on fire.

This time, he tries to breathe through the nose. “Tell me by hitting forks or whatever, hit it once.”

There is one, tiny sound escaping within the confinement of the room.

“If you think that there’s nothing better to do at night than to annoy me, hit it twice.”

Two hits.

“If you think that I am wrong in every factions and decisions, do it three times.”

Three hits.

“If you think,” he says with some difficulty. His eyes drop heavily. “If you think that Robespierre loved you and still lead you to your sentence, hit it four times.”

There is an hesitant splutter of utensils, and everything blows off everywhere again, this time from his working table, where drawers are all pulled out, and pictures shatter under the weight of the small earthquake. Saint-Just doesn’t move an inch. He doesn’t want to bother to lift up his head to even see the cacophonous spectacle in front of him.

I should have said that he hesitated when I asked him if he wanted you in his bed, he thinks offhandedly. That would have definitely send my house in a poll of lava and I could finally sleep without all these sounds around me. It’s already as tiring as it is.

Instead, his eyelids twitch, once, twice, until they close completely, letting the shatters behind and beyond the window to lure him to sleep.

The incessant flakes of cold aren’t dreamt away in his light sleep.

He wakes up with a throbbing pain on the back, a shoulder that he suspects to be dislocated, and that letter he had written to Desmoulins on his lap. Mon admiration pour vous.

The plate lays in two pieces side by side, a reminder for last night that he didn’t need. He would break my heart if he could, but he can’t, so he tries to break my neck instead.

The letter is lighter than last time he held it. Something is gone, and he dares to hope that it’s the words that disappeared.

He burns it this time around, just to make sure.

 

*

 

“What’s wrong with your shoulder?” Philippe asks, after the session at the Convention, his heels clicking on the floor. He touches it hesitatingly and immediately retreats his hand when Antoine gasps, sweat breaking out on his brows.

“It’s nothing,” he does his best at a shrug when half of them isn’t working. Lebas eyes him suspiciously.

“You were barely standing during your speech!” He cries, and noticing the other members of the Convention slipping out of the room like rising sea, he takes them aside.

“Antoine,” he adds, quietly. “It has been an eventful week.”

“I was tired,” he admits. Submission is a terrible thing to do when pain is unbearable. “That’s all.”

“At least see a doctor—“

“I will,” he says. But there’s no time. He was the one who packed his sisters’ wounds every time they got hurt. “My doctor will take care of if anything’s wrong.”

Lebas doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it slip by. “Alright.” He relents, and seeing the bundle of paper in his hand, he smiles and blessedly changes the subject. “You can finally take pride to your achievements, Antoine. You always have a way of stunning them, at the Tribune!”

“It takes nothing to impress these tedious old fools,” he says. “Besides, I thought pride was a sin.”

Philippe shakes his head fondly and grins. “Well, not anymore.”

“The Convention or the matter of pride?”

“Both, as I would like to believe,” he says. “In an ideal world, it would only be the matter of pride that’s changed.”

“But there’s no ideal world,” he answers, seeing his friend’s stare at his shoulder. “These men have thicker skin than the Bible.”

Bubble tide of an Empire, a Republic, and Federalism. These men and those past and beyond them chose something. Something, what? He lets out a breath. He seems to be doing that often, these days. Lebas’ stare on his left shoulder is making his jaw twitch.

He offers a brief, at what he hopes to be a comforting smile to his friend. “Don’t frown like that, if we were to go off battles, you should be prepared to step on my dead or incarcerated body.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Philippe answers. “There’s still time.”

“You could write some waxing poetry before me when a bullet would pierce through,” he says lightly. “Better than Brissot and his awful script, I am certain. You told me that your son has a way with words.”

“He’s a newborn, but knows how to speak to the ladies,” he smiles. Saint-Just gives him a blank stare. “With his mother, of course.”

He shares a small laugh together, and the pain that he felt for the whole morning is promptly forgotten. The shuffles of clothes behind him slow down, and the Convention has almost finished its evacuation.

“Is Robespierre at the committee?” Philippe asks, and suddenly not only the pain comes back like waves, but a new headache added to it, of all things.

“He’s resting,” he says, resisting the urge to smack his friend’s mouth with his hand. “He has those periods where he needs this, you know that.”

“Élizabeth told me that her sister is very worried,” Philippe frowns.

“Why?”

“Well, you know, the trial of the Dantonist faction has,” he tilts his head, and softly, says. “Has, um, has left impact on him. Everyone sane enough will notice.”

“It’s a lot for him, I presume.”

“Desmoulins was his friend,” he says, almost mournfully. “I have known him for a few years too, he’s a nice but chaotic fellow at times. I enjoyed his presence, generally speaking.”

“People can hear you,” he warns.

“My apologies,” Philippe says, sounding a little lost. “I just had a son, I guess that I am a little nostalgic, that’s all. My heart lies with the Republic, undivided.”

There’s a pause. “Was he a good friend?”

“What?”

He repeats, somewhat weaker, and Lebas looks at him for a little longer that is needed. Philippe shrugs. “Weren’t you friends when you were at Blérancourt for the elections?”

“I didn’t know him back then,” he says. I still don’t.

Philippe offers him in pity. “Well, I suppose that he was a good friend. We were acquaintances. Maybe you should ask Robespierre about it?”

“You just told me that he’s trapped in his own bed.”

He sighs, and gives him a nice, lovely pat on his shoulder. He squirms inwardly at the pain. Maybe his right shoulder is a little broken as well.

“He is receiving no one, and if it isn’t for Elizabeth’s sister to confirm it, I might just as well trust the Parisian rumors and believe that he’s dead.”

“He’s not a god,” he replies. “Death won’t take him suffer for this long, if that’s the case.”

Lebas looks at him with wide eyes. “I thought you hold him as one of the high and above the clouds?”

“Well, I am able to change my mind from time to time.”

“Because gods don’t get sick?” He asks. And god, what would he give for the pain to stop. His shoulder feels as if it’s been imprinted by someone’s burning handprint, a reminder, always a reminder.

“No,” he says. “Because gods don’t need to kill for affection. None of us are above that, not even him.”

 

*

 

Saint-Just has misunderstood a lot of things in his youth. He is still young, just like the Convention would like to point out sometimes, the youngest, citizen, you’re the youngest here.

He hears whispers, sometimes, with restrained laughter in their voices. And yet– his gaze bears the history of a hundred years! There’s a chuckle. Have you seen him? His eyes are throwing ice at you, my friend. I tremble just to think of it!

But Saint-Just has misunderstood a lot of things in his youth, he knows. Beliefs like that he will be a great writer (wrong), that he will marry Thérèse (wrong), that he is going to achieve nothing great in his life than a dozen of pamphlets and treatises (wrong and wrong and wrong).

And most conveniently, the assumption that no one will hunts him just for the sake of his apparently despicable character. Should’ve seen it coming.

The rocks beneath his heels shake, but maybe he’s the one shaking all along, really. He passes by a printer and a bookstore, brought some Goethe and bread at the bakery. A small child bites his fingers off when he tries to give him some bread. Citizen! My name is Charlotte, I’m six. I have my sick husband and five children to feed and care, she says, her legs numb and dirty. Now, give me bread or give me death!

But I’m giving you, he says.

But I want you dead, she says, but has taken the bread regardless. She lets him walk away, Goethe laughing something about lost love under the book cover.

He goes back home, of course, one has to return home eventually. It’s just odd that someone else is in your room and even more so for that certain someone to be your archenemy and died just a few weeks back. Of something that he personally contributed. Should’ve seen it coming.

It’s all comes down to nothing, he guesses. They have been circling round and around each other so much, there’s so much can a revolution be; it’s perhaps only fair to end with a last round rounder than it needs to be.

The house, as expected, is empty. Also, other things that came out just as he thought: his room being completely, undoubtedly upside down.

Truly, amazingly, _catastrophically_ upside and down.

Saint-Just grabs the spilled sheets, tries to, at least. The throbbing, incessant pain in his head is just like a hummingbird, buzzing and volatile thing, ready to come undone by the bees.

The air tickles his skin, and it’s not even night yet.

He lets out a deep, long sigh. He will have to wait for Albert to come back. He can’t move anything with his dislocated shoulder, and all he wants is to collapse right here, right now.

So he supposes he does, after two brave and painful minutes, he supposes he slides to the floor like a dying man gasping for the sand to come quicker, to swallow him whole.

He skips in and out of consciousness when Albert wakes him up, his bones desperately trying to fit inside his body, provoking ire somewhere in between the limbs.

The cold pickles again into his skin, almost familiar by the touch. His fingers twitch. It’s not Albert.

He opens his mouth to say something _don’t touch me_ , _I didn’t know that you stroll around in the sun as well_ and _go away,_ but he closes them in a clip because he can’t speak when the sand finally, blessedly comes and reduces his words to nothing.

He wavers, and touches something he supposes to be the bed, until he realizes it’s the blanket that’s been discarded on the floor by the other man’s madness. He clutches it tight around him, and falls out of consciousness once again, this time willingly so.

(Between the blur of his slowly falling lids, there’s footsteps and wind and blows. Outside is Paris, and inside is the same. Paris and the cold. The footsteps continue. It’s Albert or someone else. Someone _real_.

He closes his eyes in relief.)

 

*

 

“Mind telling me what happened?”

“My shoulder is getting better, I have seen my doctor. Don’t worry.”

“Then why in the world would you be wearing this in the middle of the summer heat?”

He breathes. He thinks he sees white, frozen air when he spoke.

“It’s cold,” he says. “It’s Paris.”

 

*

 

_When you heal, I will show you Paris._

Saint-Just contemplates the lines, doesn’t try to understand them. Because Paris is not his, and no one’s. He says instead, “I’ll never heal with you around me.”

He hears scratches on the paper with a quill in the air, moving independently from each other. It starts not to matter, sometimes, these visions of madness when there are words that taint your skin.

 _Fine_ , was added at the beginning of the sentence. _When you heal, you will show me Paris._

The thoughts of ghost bickering did not make him laugh. “Do you know when you will be gone?” He asks, enthused by the idea.

The independent toy’s wings flutter. The quill stops, as if it were thinking.

 _When your high held and prideful head evens out in the basket._ It writes. _Or to be free, as you called it._

“I didn’t call it _that_ freedom,” he mutters, but the movements didn’t stop there. Some of the spilled ink smidgens his cuffs black.

 _I can’t go elsewhere_. The signs and letters are looped downwards, as if it were lazily drawn sketches of a painting. _Entrapment after life, sounds it’s what you deserve._

“Then where’s Danton?” He says, then almost feels sorry for saying it.

 _Nobody commands Danton,_ it writes, and the quill falls back on the table, resting there like it’s never been moved.

“I admired your writing, once,” he says after all is silent. “I worshipped a lot of people back then.”

He has always loved reading, enjoyed the way it conveyed feelings so he doesn’t have to, the thrill of understanding someone so intimately that you need to put it into words, so that it sinks into the flesh and the skin. He writes with books in hand, and books don’t just write themselves.

He felt like it was that, with Desmoulins, with Robespierre, words with someone that’s not, in fact, only flesh and skin. An ideal.

He is lying on the bed, his thumb making circles with his index, he feels a soft tug on his hair, almost a caress. He’s so tired that he leans into it, feeling the gentle scrap on his threads.

Then the tug becomes a full force pull, and Saint-Just, in his half-sleep state, bites out a curse.

He glares at absolutely nothing but the lingering feeling of ice on his forehead. “For a second I was hoping you were gone.”

But the quill soon flew in the air again. It isn’t night yet, so he can see every moves of the feather, the ink dripping unto the floor like blood. He lets out a gasp when his hand is taken away from his side, shaking. He stills himself, but the tremblings didn’t stop. It writes on his palm with careful precision, and he feels a bubble inside him burst.

“Stop,” he says, but it’s too late. He laughs, god, he _giggles_ at the sensation of the scratch on his palm, the maddening feeling of being tickled by a ghost of all people, yet couldn’t stop himself even if it stopped moving. The laughter wavers and subsides. He brings a hand to his face, ready to kill or be killed.

He feels the need to roll to his side and disappears under the depths of the earth, but he has manners for guests (and ghosts). He brings another hand to his face then, and waits until his face to stop feeling like a freshly boiled egg waiting to be caught aflame in his mouth.

He stands up from his bed with a tumble. He thinks he hears the sound of his shoulder crying out loud.

“Be glad that you are already dead,” he says. He supposes that shuffling of papers counts as an answer.

A surge of cold air touches his hand. He looks. The letters are a little torn to the side than usual. He better _not_ be laughing. _Sorry, didn’t know that you were ticklish._

“Something tells me that nothing in that _sorry_ corresponds to its meaning,” he answers. “What did you want to ask me?”

 _Maybe that’s the reason why I am still trapped here,_ it writes after a pause. _There is something you must tell me. Promise me._

“I don’t own anything to you.” He looks at his palm, a letter was barely being written before he acted like a lunatic. It reads a _Lu_. He sighs, and knows. This is going to be difficult.

 _I am a dead man_ , it tries to convince him, almost as frantic as that time when he wrote his farewell. _I don’t find you cruel enough to deny a dead man’s wish._

He arches an eyebrow. Well, that’s surprising, you are not sick, you are dead, and not here, not anywhere, you belong to exactly nowhere. “I find this hard to believe that I am not exceedingly cruel for anything.”

He stares at the smudge on his palm, and he suddenly has the need to wash his hand over and over until his head ends up in the sink, puking.

“Mme Desmoulins had the same public trial a week after you,” he says, rubbing his hands. “Now, what is your question?”

The quill quivers like a cat’s tail at his prey, and the desk breaks in half. Saint-Just can’t deal for another day of house management. He grabs the quill, and shoves it in the air.

“If you move an inch of my furniture I am not going to answer any of your questions,” he warns, and the quill is snatched away from his hand, anger seeping in the air.

_I could also threaten you like that. You have no advantage here, you can’t see me. I can destroy this house._

“I thought you knew better,” he snaps. “I won’t tell what I decide not to.”

Heavy, lingering silence ensues.

 _Yes_ — it writes, _yes, yes, yes I know you are known you are like this yes I know I know you are sincere, and you mean everything you say—_

And then he crosses out the whole sentence in one stroke. Under it, he writes in a more neat, trained manner of a journalist, _you mean everything you say._

“I mean everything I say,” he agrees, not really dwelling on it. “So don’t break anything. Your anger issues can be sort it out alone.”

The air shifts. He almost gets the impression that Desmoulins nodded.

 _Tell me about her and my son._ And painfully, belatedly, it adds, _please_.

“I don’t know a lot about them,” he says honestly, hearing the tinge of disappointment in his voice and hating it. “Your wife is quickly sentenced after your death, and I don’t know where your son is now.”

There’s several dots on the paper, it looks as if he’d been trying to pierce through them to reveal some secrets. These are expensive.

 _You could ask Collot, he is the public prosecutor, unless he is dead already,_ the dots say, finally having the decency of forming an intelligible sentence. _Or just go to my house._

“I will be on mission soon,” he says, “I don’t have time to get myself killed in the process.”

There’s a pause. _Where?_

“Lyon. Surely you have heard of it. I can’t risk myself right now.”

The dots become lines until it reaches a conclusion. _Robespierre_.

“As I said before.”

_He won’t kill you, at least not right now._

“No,” he says. “It’s not me who will be if I ever mention your name.”

The quill dips into more ink and Saint-Just desperately needs a hand wash right now. It circles several times around the previous words: _You mean everything you say._

It means the previous words: _You promised me, bastard._

“You think he knows everything about you.” It’s not a question.

 _I was his best friend. Sometimes I believe he still thinks we are._ It writes.

“Is it,” he asks, his tongue dry. “Is it true?”

_I don’t know. I have been taught that everything changes and proven that it does. I still hate you, all things considered._

_Not that it matters too much, now._

“Yes,” he says, knowing that he shouldn’t feel like this, shouldn’t reply as quickly as he did, how it does matter. “I hate you just as well. So here’s a deserted constant in your runaway soul.”

Camille Desmoulins draws a very, very ugly man, and cuts his head with a straight line right at the neck. _For your pain,_ he writes, and Saint-Just hates himself for smiling just a little more than he should, which is not at all.

“D’accord,” he says, “I will go to him. Stop drawing on these, the paper is expensive.”

There’s another drawing even more horrid that he suspects to be Lucifer himself, a trail of ink on his hideous face, a grimace. _That’s who you are and how you draw._

He rationally decides not to start a feud with invisibility and accepts his gratitude with reluctance.

 

*

 

Élénore stares.

Saint-Just takes away his feathered hat and probed it with his hands. He feels velvet and rejoices in it. His dark coat feels tight against his body. “Citoyenne,” he greets.

“Citoyen Saint-Just,” she replies, her dark hair sticking a little on her face. “How’s Élizabeth?”

“Philippe is always telling me how’s she is splendid in the sun,” he says.

She laughs, “Of course she is,” her dark eyes shine with mirth, and Saint-Just wonders if that’s what Lebas is talking about, bathing in sunlight. “You are here for citizen Robespierre,” she points out.

“He is in his room,” he says. 

She tilts her head, gesturing. “See for yourself.”

“Antoine,” he hears a voice. “If you are here to discuss about your mission, even Carnot would be a better option than me.”

He frowns slightly at the sight of Robespierre’s almost translucent skin. “That’s not the matter,” he adds, “I did not know that you were here, pardon me.”

“It’s alright,” he answers. “I–“

A dog leaps to Saint-Just’s face and all words stop while hell broke loose. Should’ve seen it coming.

He falls– _of course he does_ – on the ground. He feels it giving him kisses, or possibly, tuberculosis. Hysteria tries to make its way to his mouth, the need to burst out laughing (again), but he stops himself at the last moment.

Robespierre calls it back, but the disease stays. He coughs just to make sure it does filtrate his lungs, twice just because.

“I’m sorry,” he says, sounding genuine. “Brount is excited by guests, sometimes. It’s... the time of the year.”

He wipes his face clean and contemplates the floor instead.

That said, Robespierre extends a hand. Saint-Just finds it warm and calloused, and that he minds it _a lot._

People couple like dogs in revolutions, they know that the bitches don’t last long, Danton said. He shakes his head slowly, to pull the strings off his head, to stop losing his mind.

“Nothing is hurt?” Robespierre’s steady voice brings him back.

He shakes his head again, remembers how to hold a hand and breathes at the same time. Desmoulins is doing this to him. “Sorry, it’s been a month,” he says instead, sensing the hand tensing from the words.

“It is,” he acquiesces, looking at Élénore. The sun is sipping in. “Come, we can discuss what you need in my room.”

It’s not until they mounted the stairs that Saint-Just dares, “You were walking your dog?”

“He and I both needed the air,” he replies, opening the door.

Saint-Just almost doesn’t want to enter that room ever again, with the eyes that stare and condemn, with that suffocating confinement. He backs a step, and then takes another one onwards.

“Thank you for inviting me in,” he says against the bile that rises from his throat. “How’s your health?”

“It’s been steady since,” Maximilien says. “I will be back to the Jacobins soon enough. I might need more time to integrate for the committee, but you will see me. Now, if you will.”

“I’m glad to hear of it, the work you do for the Republic is extremely valuable,” the window is still closed. His heart sinks with the rhythm of his swallowing. “I– had come today for a subject of personal matter.”

“What would make the great Saint-Just hesitate?” Robespierre’s carefully blank face reveals a crease of a smile. “The spokesperson for your upcoming marriage?”

“No, what makes you think this way?”

“I have never noticed your eyes are cerulean before,” he says. “You are staring as if you need a favor.”

He blinks. Now he is so conscious of his eyes that he might grudge them out. “Well, yes. That was my purpose.”

“If that’s the case,” Maximilien says, fingers gently tapping on the desk, thinking. “You’ll need to tell me the plan of your ceremony.”

“What?”

“I need to know when to start the speech. I understand that’s purely introductory, but I will take great care of it.”

“I don’t-“

“Mind telling me her name?” He asks. “I have never seen her, haven’t I?”

Saint-Just opens his mouth, closes it, tries again. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid that I am not going to marry anytime soon.”

“Oh, right,” he says, shifting his weight. “Of course.”

Antoine doesn’t ask what is so evident in what he just said. He asks instead, “What happened to Desmoulins’ child and the rest of his family?”

“Ah,” and there is a closed off expression that Saint-Just sees every time when he brings out Camille Desmoulins. He doesn’t bring him up, he merely, barely mentioned his name. He hates him. “So you too.”

His hands ball into fists, do not defend yourself, do not— “Whatever you are thinking, Robespierre, I have the certitude to tell you that it is not what it seems.”

Robespierre paces deliberately in this little room. He feels like a prey, a situation where none of them are hunters. “You see him too?”

His words sink in alongside the meaning. Of course. Of course Desmoulins has been lying about being unable of going outside, of course he has been seeing him. They are friends, and they are not. The betrayal coils deep in his stomach, but doesn’t manifest itself. He shouldn’t even feel this way in the first place.

“You too?” He says, feeling too small all together.

“Yes,” he says. “In my dreams, I do. He often stares at me like you did a moment ago, and there is blood.” Robespierre struggles to find the words, his tongue quivering inside, trying. “You want a clean conscience, but is too afraid to ask the others.”

Saint-Just’s fist unclenches against his will. The anxiety subsides. So he doesn’t know _that_.

“Yes,” he agrees. But I am not fucking afraid. “I assumed that you would have the information.”

“You are a honest man,” Robespierre amends. “One of the purest man I have met so far in my life.”

He cannot but feeling the surge of a flush at the praise. _I would rather prefer if we could talk about the family of a man we arrested and indirectly executed._ “I, ah, appreciate that you think so highly of me, Maximilien.”

“No hymn is too much for a virtuous citizen,” he says, pauses. “As for Ca– Desmoulins’ family, I have heard that they send his son away for his education.”

They both know how untrue that is. No one leaves Paris for education. “What about the other members of the boy’s family?”

“They stayed,” he says. “Though if the committee has no more issues with them anymore after interrogations, they would leave soon enough, I believe.”

“That’s all you know?”

“Yes,” he says. “I have other preoccupation than to spy on an already settled issue.”

“Sorry,” he tries to show his gratitude, tries again. “Thank you.” And adds, “There’s no reason for me not sleeping now.”

Robespierre’s green eyes hint at a smile, but they suddenly turn to ice when he catches something in his vision. “Saint-Just,” he starts but doesn’t finish. His fingers, cool and pointed, touch his neck like a knife.

He grabs him by the wrist, and gently leans closer. “There’s a cut,” he points out.

“Ah,” he breathes. “Yes, there’s a cut,” he replies, quite stupidly. He can’t focus with Robespierre’s hand peeling through his cravat. It’s calloused.

He can count the freckles. He can’t count them, there are so many.

“How did you do this?”

_Camille Desmoulins had taken my home and knocked me down with his ghost-exclusive magic fingers. He broke my shoulder, he can break my neck one day. There’s a cut, what about it?_

“I fell down the stairs,” he says.

Robespierre crosses his arms, looking straight at him.

His hands clutches subtly enough at the fabrics of his coat, feeling the nails digging in his palms anyway. “Earlier with Brount, I assume. Don’t worry yourself too much.”

Robespierre stares for a little more, his pale eyes examining for other possible and impossible wounds. He tries not to square up his shoulders.

“Okay,” he turns his gaze away. “If that is all, citizen...”

“I shall bother you no more,” Saint-Just takes the hint. “Thank you.”

“You are good company,” he says in return. “I’d hope that my words could help you for your nightmares. Are they frequent?”

“Quite, if I must admit myself.”

“Mine are incessant,” he complies. “He will never stop talking as long as he won’t get what he wants.”

Saint-Just stops at the track between the door. He does not need to look at Robespierre to know what his expression brings. “What does he want, then?”

A clear, almost innocent answer echoed in the room. It’s too small, he thinks offhandedly, even for one person. “Why, to change everything. Isn’t that all he wanted in the end? He changed me,” he adds, “and maybe you.”

“That doesn’t matter in the greater scale of things,” he protests, albeit weakly.

“Everything matters nowadays,” Maximilien retorts. “And you,” he says. “Don’t die at Lyon, the Republic needs you to thrive, just as everything else.”

Robespierre’s footsteps were heard, but he doesn’t turn to see. “Don’t die,” he repeats, and this time, it sounds like a command.

Saint-Just walks back home with a sun burn on his neck. He didn’t bother to pull his cravat to its place. Maybe he should clean the wound after all.

 

*

 

Windmills, windmills, windmills. What was the joke again?

The people are yelling his name, the Bastille is taken, the old world falls apart, the writer and the fanatic and the aristocrat are freed, Camille is not there, people claimed windmills, that windmills were there with them.

Windmills have written journals, pamphlets and open letters. Windmills were there at August the fourth, the tenth, thirty-one. Even he doesn’t remember if he had witnessed them, and maybe that’s the joke here, that he is what windmills are, turning and turning, trapped in the recesses of history.

Windmills, someone called. I went to Robespierre.

Windmills swirl in the wind. Someone coughs.

Your son left the country. Your family will too.

_Where?_

I don’t know.

And his eyes stay like this, genuine and sincere. There is a cut on his neck, windmills are good for inflicting this kind of injury.

_That’s all?_

Someone pauses a little, his eyelashes flutter softly against the blow. Yes, he says. Yes.

Windmills care for a family’s survival. Windmills know that there is a war. Windmills know that death is sometimes not inevitable.

 _There’s a cut on your neck._ Windmills write. _Did I do that?_

Someone’s eyes widen, like sunshine penetrating a windowless room, bluer than ever. It’s a pool of distilled water. Someone is smiling, and windmills are spinning in confusion by the new direction of the wind.

Don’t mention it. It’s just a sunburn. He says, Camille. He asks, Camille. He repeats, Camille.

Have anyone mention that your last name is funny? It’s like windmills. It suits you so well, Desmoulins.

 

*

 

Saint-Just never asked for blood more than he needed war. He just never thought that he wouldn’t be able to die in the two of them.

“What was the last thought before you died?” He says to the room.

The room is silent. But the answer came down on paper anyway. _Lucile_.

He flickers the cufflinks on his wrists by moving it rapidly, readies himself to go. “I thought it would be something like: this is how liberty dies,” he says. “With wildly dramatic gestures and all that theatrics.”

He retreats himself to the closet, taking the feathered hat. _You look like a peacock._ He writes, and Antoine can’t help but shakes his head a little more, making the feathers move like another revolutionary parade.

“Thanks.”

_Move it a bit on the left, you are doing it wrong._

He huffs. “I don’t take orders from a ghost.”

 _On the side._ He scribbles, and the wind blows just the right way. For him.

Antoine growls. “Now my hair is all wrecked.”

_Just like you._

He sets himself straighter and for once doesn’t start a fight. His palms felt too cold and limp to strangle someone that isn’t here. He imagines them handling a spear and fails.

 _Go_. He writes. _Make them bleed while you can._

“Will you stay here all the while?”

 _Yes_. And he circles _Lucile_ with black ink. It’s a goodbye, perhaps a farewell. Antoine has enough of them, but lets go anyway.

“Don’t starve yourself in here,” he says. “I have cookie jars somewhere in my closet.”

He supposes that Camille Desmoulins writes something along the lines of I hope you wind up dead, and he supposes that it’s a good luck, and he takes it with little gratitude he has left in his heart.

 

*

 

Camille thinks of Lucile near the Bastille, at the Palais-Royal. He thinks of her looking at him wondering if this is how men make history. He thinks of her wearing that wedding dress that’s not quite a wedding dress, white on linen on white on laces. He thinks of Lucile Duplessis, of Lucile Desmoulins. He thinks of Bastille again, her watching something crumble, but not sure what. He thinks about kissing her. Lucile, Lucile.

Lucile, he thinks. What will Lucile thinks of me?

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> No, I’m not going to let you go until I have said all the weird historical events that actually occured: 
> 
> 1) Barère really did want to steal S-J’s bed. Well, we only know that he wanted a bed ‘exactly like the one of Saint-Just’s’ but hey, I’m allowed to speculate. 
> 
> 2) The flowers S-J sent to Desmoulins bascially meant ‘screw you’ in 18th century flower language. It’s great. 
> 
> 3) The letter Desmoulins returned to S-J is a real letter that Antoine wrote to him in the early days of the Revolution. I didn’t bother to translate it, but all you need to know is that he ended with ‘patriotic rage’. What Desmoulins wrote him back can be roughly translated to: I think you are a piece of shit, sir. 
> 
> 4) Desmoulins really wrote a letter to Robespierre before his execution. We never knew if he have received it or not. We did not find that said letter in his room after the Thermidorian Reaction. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! If you ever decide to leave a comment I might love you forever so beware.


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